Director Martin Campbell's Die Hard pastiche Cleaner finds an unlikely hero in window-washer Joey Locke (Daisy Ridley). From a young age, Locke has been unafraid of heights since she had to scale her kitchen's cabinets to escape her imposing parents. As an adult, she struggles both being there for her older autistic brother Michael (Matthew Tuck) and finding fulfillment in her dead-end job. She doesn't just scrub any windows, she helps ensure tidiness for a skyscraper belonging to corrupt "green" company Agnian Energy. All the bosses here are jerks, but a paycheck’s a paycheck.
One fateful day, when external circumstances force Joey to bring Michael with her to work, a big party for all the Agnian Energy bigwigs is brutally interrupted. Extreme activist Marcus Blake (Clive Owen) and his crew have arrived to cause chaos in the form of knocking the partygoers unconscious and tying up all the Agnian bigwigs responsible for real-world devastation. He and his cronies, including Joey’s co-worker Noah (Taz Skylar) have a hostage situation plan that becomes increasingly violent and out-of-control. With her brother and innocent lives in jeopardy, former army recruit Joey is now their only hope. It’s time for her to clean things up and bring the baddies to justice. Yippee-ki-yay, and all that jazz.
Much like going through the filmography of director Robert Zemeckis, Cleaner starts out strong but gets increasingly underwhelming. Its initial scenes are at least fun, particularly a montage of Joey and Michael getting on a series of wrong buses. Joey's barely cut-off profanity signals the end of each segment in this montage, which editors Jim Page and Cheryl Potter execute with nice timing. It’s also amusing that Cleaner, much like Beau is Afraid or a John Water movie, occupies a world where everyone is untrustworthy.
Billionaires Geoffrey (Rufus Jones) and Gerald Milton (Lee Boardman) are expectedly unsavory. However, even Joey's fellow co-workers are oversized unscrupulous caricatures. Meanwhile, the home Michael gets kicked out of in one of Cleaner’s earliest sequences is guilty of taking money from disabled folks. Screenwriters Simon Uttley, Paul Andrew Williams, and Matthew Orton weaves a universe where corruption is everywhere. The only solace here is in scrappy screw-up Joey, played with Ridley’s boundless supply of endearing charm.
If there’s any reason Cleaner should be remembered, it’s for revealing a new talent of Rey Palpatine. Daisy Ridley is terrific at swearing. Throughout Cleaner’s first act, Joey is constantly offering up profane words to her irritating co-workers followed up by the most delightful “screw you” grin. It’s a sight that never gets old. Some actors known for playing young and/or squeaky-clean characters come off as “trying too hard” when they subsequently attempt to play darker figures. Think Tom Holland in the port-a-potty in Cherry. In contrast, handling vulgar language with finesse comes so naturally to Ridley. Someone get her a Jordan Belfort-esque character to play or a quality R-rated comedy. She could be the heir to Samuel L. Jackson’s throne of profanity master.
Unfortunately, Ridley’s not in Cleaner nearly as much as she should be. For much of the film’s second act, Joey is stuck on a bosun's chair dangling from the side of the building. Campbell’s camera instead focuses heavily on the baddies and some cops on the ground. This is where Cleaner loses its way. Instead of focusing on fun action sequences, the script gets enamored with excessive evildoer double-crosses (close enough, welcome back Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End) and ham-fisted dialogue explaining various villain motivations. The latter problem emanates from Cleaner’s wishy-washy approach to using environmental activists as villains.
Way too much screentime is dedicated to clarifying “#NotAllActivists” instead of just giving us an entertaining feature. Something like Die Hard is conservative as heck, yet it’s so fun that it’s easy to stomach all its political pro-cop nonsense. That feature wouldn’t have been nearly as engrossing if John McClane’s exploits stopped halfway through so characters could rigidly discuss varying approaches to policing. Meanwhile, the overly convoluted script even features a brief plot thread of Joey being framed for all the chaos inside that eventually fizzles out into nothing.
A more elegantly streamlined narrative could’ve given viewers more of what they wanted. Audiences are here to see Ridley beat people up, which doesn’t really happen until the third act. Once that happens, Campbell and cinematographer Eigil Bryld frame the various skirmishes reasonably well. I’m a sucker for action movie heroes using unique weapons to dispatch baddies, like John Wick deploying library books to brutalize an adversary in John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum. Joey gets a few of those fun moments in battling foes with a wrench while even Michael gets to join in on the fun. Yay for an autistic action movie participant who isn’t Ben Affleck in glasses!
Still, even these few fight scenes feel too little too late. They’re typically over as soon as they begin while, more distressingly, they’re set in generic-blue-tinted backrooms. No backdrops as fun as that factory full of Mardi Gras floats from Hard Target’s finale are here. It doesn’t help that Joey’s punch-heavy journey leads her to a confrontation with Noah, a guy best described as Temu Solomon Lane. Taz Skylar commits to playing this guy as “wild”, a dude with his finger permanently rested on a trigger. However, but few of his oversized outbursts leave a mark. He’s certainly nowhere near entertaining enough to justify centering so much of Cleaner on his antics at the expense of Joey.
The greatest Cleaner moments are its simplest pleasures. Even I couldn’t stop myself from letting out a little “woo!” when a villainous hacker broke into a computer system and announced “and we’re in!” Daisy Ridley is also a deeply compelling performer, particularly whenever she’s telling off powerful men and swearing like a sailor. Unfortunately, Cleaner gets too bogged down in an overly complicated narrative short on fight scenes and Ridley. This is no A Good Day to Die Hard disaster (what is?), but Cleaner unfortunately can’t even reach the fleeting PG-13 pleasures of Live Free or Die Hard, let alone that original John McClane adventure.